Technology and War
Posted by Niall Harrison
23 December 2011
Two discussions of how changes in the level of technology might alter the course of a war. First, Jaymee Goh, as part of a long post about Scott Westerfeld's Behemoth series, in which World War I happens with more brutal weapons, considers the temptations of power:
There's always an assumption of a specific trajectory on how such conflict begins: everybody wants to get a bigger piece of pie, everybody gets mad at everybody else for impinging on said pieces of pie, everybody gets into a big ol' pie fight, the pie gets ruined, someone or more gets hurt from pie in the eye, everybody stops in horror at what has happened to the pie, they gruffly say sorry, attempt some cleanup and make some solemn promises about how to divide up the next pie. (Nobody stops to question the existence or the necessity of the pie.)
And sometimes, there is an assumption that accelerated technology also means accelerated trajectories of this sort. I think Cherie Priest got it right that accelerated technology actually prolongs trajectories of conflict. I don't believe in one second that people with so much power--and there is so much power in a Clanker machine! We saw Clankers use their machines to murder Deryn's squad in Behemoth! And there is so much power in Darwinist tech! The flechette bats are pretty much tiny little living machine guns!--I don't believe these people would actually give up fighting so easily. World leaders have never truly recognized the costs of their stupid wars, all through history, even in our fucking present. There IS a reason why Afghani and Iraqi casualties far outnumber the 3000 deaths that supposedly precipitated the Iraqi War.
Second, FJM considers the sustainability of the conflict in Kameron Hurley's God's War:
Furthermore, wars don't work like this. Hurley describes a war in which perhaps one in one hundred boys comes back alive (possibly even less). Hundreds of bounty hunters are bringing in a deserter each (dead) each week, so we can assume that each week perhaps 1000 are dying. That's a million every two years. Now that is a sustainable figure for a short war but it isn't sustainable for a long one. At which point some of you will be thinking WWI? or Eritrea/Ethiopia? But that's the point. They are *short* wars.
The general pattern of wars goes like this:
Short wars up to about five years, give or take, can have very high casualty rates. They expend a lot of people (mostly but not always men) in fairly short bursts of action. The numbers dying in those short bursts go up dramatically in the 1860s but the signs are there at everything from Crecy to Waterloo, what happens in the 19th century is that individual battles become amorphous. Most of these wars end because someone is too worn out to fight but it's astonishing how many of them have short skirmishes afterwards (we don't tend to hear about the resistance to western occupation of Europe after the Second World War).
Long wars can last a hundred years, but they tend to consist of truces, skirmishes, another truce, a battle or two, some short high cost wars, etc, etc. There is one school of thought that reckons the hundred year European war starts about 1870 and doesn't really conclude until the Iron Curtain goes down. But note, no high level bloodshed across a hundred years (talk to Quakers about this one: their war relief in Europe goes on without a break until the 1950s).
